When I tell people that I want to When I tell people that I want to become a writer, I get a lot of feedback along the lines of, “That’s a really competitive field… are you sure you want to jump from job to job, while living in a cardboard box and scraping coins off the street?”

You know, stuff like that. Why is it that doctors and engineers never get questioned for their craft?

For some reason, writers, artists, musicians, and creative people alike have this reputation for being unstable in all aspects - emotionally, mentally, and financially. Half of the world’s creative geniuses have committed suicide, while the other half eventually let their work drive themselves to their deaths.

Why is it that creativity and suffering have always somehow been inseparably linked?

Our means of survival stem from the approval of the audience itself. If the general public doesn’t like your work, you won’t sell, and you’ll be living in that box. Therefore, what pushes us into mental insanity are the reactions we receive for our own craft.

Even more so, creativity is absolutely mystical and mysterious. As you may realize, anything “mysterious” actually just means “secretly crazy”.

You know how some people are born with a third eye, having supernatural abilities to see and communicate with the dead?

I believe that artists are born with some internal resource for their creativity, bearing work that comes through from an unidentified source.

No two artists are programmed the same way. As for me, it’s impossible to sit at my desk and come up with something completely brilliant - God knows, my most creative work takes me by surprise, like a bolt of lightning that I must capture through the string of a kite.

Pure electricity, as inspiration usually comes.

Who said it was wrong to be absolutely crazy, anyway?

To the creative people of the world -
Catch the lightning while you can.